Overcoming Fear

Many people go through their lives carrying considerable amounts of fear, sometimes this fear is linked to specific events and sometimes the fear is general fear of past decisions, future decisions or something else more general.

Many psychological and counselling therapies like to identify specific emotional events where that fear may have started, let’s call those Significant Emotional Events. Often councillors and therapists will want you to discuss these significant emotional events to uncover what happened, why it happened and how you can deal with the fear. However what is better than dealing with the fear, how about removing it altogether?

Negative emotions such as fear build and build in our lives, and this building is always based on our previous experience of the negative emotion. So thinking about it logically there must have been a first time we experienced this negative emotion, and it’s from this first experience that everything else is built? So if we can identify this first negative experience, deal with that and remove it then the entire chain of experiences will come crashing down.

This chain of events is what is known in therapy as a Gestalt. A Gestalt is a chain of negative emotions very much like loose beads on a necklace, with one single bead (the very first negative experience) acting as the bead that holds all of the others in place on the thread. And if we remove this single first bead then all of the other beads will fall off easily. And this is the basic principle of Time Line Therapy™.

Time Line Therapy™ is not something that you can do by yourself as it needs a master practitioner to guide you through the process and challenge you. If one tried to do it on oneself one would let oneself off the hook too easily, and not resolve the problem!

However, there are a few things you can do to deal with any fear in your life.

The first thing to understand is that fear itself is a label. It’s a label we have given an emotion in order to identify it and talk about it. The label is not the emotion itself, it’s simply a way that us humans use to share information and talk about things. The problem is that labels mean different things to different people, so when one person talks about fear they are not talking about the same thing as another person.

Let’s think about this, imagine you’re sitting on the front row of the world’s fastest and highest rollercoaster. All of the anticipation is building about how you’re going to go flying around the track at over 100 miles an hour… One person could describe this as fear, another person could describe it as excitement. Two emotions that are so closely entwined and yet it’s difficult to actually pin them down.

So once you realise that you are using a label to identify something the next step is to realise the negative power of using the verb ‘to be’.

Saying ‘I am afraid’ is making an equivalence using the verb ‘to be’ between yourself and the label of fear. And if you think about it now, this sentence just isn’t true. You may decide at certain times to exhibit and do the behaviour of fear, but you are not fear itself. So saying ‘I am…’ Is actually not true, is it?

Realising this for the first time, as you do now, is a big step. To understand for the first time that you have a choice about whether you decide to exhibit the behaviour or not, you can choose… and deciding now not to use the words ‘I am…’ will also allow you to separate yourself from that negative emotion – and this is a very good place to be, is it not?

Fear is an emotion that can be dealt with, once and for all, in a single session with Time line Therapy™ so if you’d like to find out more I’m certainly happy to have a free 30 min chat with you.